The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Before the heady days of internet shopping, we had Bryant Hardware. You got some impossible to find esoteric gizmo, you could probably find it down at Bryants. Or at least Ma Bryant could. If she couldn’t, trust me, Joe Google couldn’t either. And if Joe couldn’t find it, trust me again, you’d pay Top Dollar for one when you discovered it in an antique store.

My piston driven well pump quit pumping water about 6 months after I bought my palace. My water was down over 100 feet in a hand dug hole 3 feet in diameter. The pump ran fine, it just didn’t pull up the water. Down the hole 105 feet away from quenching my thirst, a foot valve had given out so we had to pull up the oak rods in 10 foot sections. Which meant cutting a hole in the wellhouse roof so we could hoist each of 10 sections high enough to unscrew the upper one from the next one below. It was nerve racking work, but then … most of life on the South End was nerve wracking back then.

When we got to the end we found the old ‘leather’ was blown out. My neighbor — who’d identified our problem in the first place — said we needed to go to town to buy another. “Another?” I asked, incredulous. “Who in holy hell is going to carry a ‘leather’ for a 1930’s well pump system?”

“Ma,” he answered. “Ma’ll have one.”

We drove to Stanwoodopolis, walked into Bryants and asked the owlish woman behind the register if she had our ‘leather’. She peered at the ruined one, then peered at us. Finally she got up with a heave and we followed her into the back section with the 20 foot ceiling of stamped tin, what’s now the food bank, down the aisle of 1950, over to the shelf of 1940 and up to some dusty boxes near the top that was all that remained of the Great Depression. She climbed up on a rickety step ladder, pushed aside a Kitty Hawk propeller and a Model T crank, rummaged through Victrola parts, muttered once or twice, then finally came up with the last two ‘leathers’ in America. “I thought I had a couple,” she said. I couldn’t believe it. “Two dollars,” she told me, probably the price back in 1928.

You folks who buy your hardware in plastic wrapping and expect the part you want has long been obsolete, well, that may be the modern condition, but for a long time on the South End, time meant nothing in Bryants. Ma finally died a decade ago and we lost the 20th Century overnight. Needless to say, I have a modern pump now that I can’t get replacement parts for my old one. And you know, I’m sure, when it malfunctions, it can’t be repaired.

I was at my local grocery checkout line, the one I’d changed 2 or 3 times, trying to anticipate the check-out time based on cart size, age of those line up, types of grocery, all those variables a bettor ranks the way a gambler at the horse track factors in jockey vs. distance run vs. history of the filly vs. age vs. condition of the track, all those reasons I don’t play the ponies. I picked the line with the least items, ignoring the age factor. It looked like a winner judging by the guy in the line I just vacated who was hustling the woman in the line even further over and who, I figured, wouldn’t be ready with check or credit card, probably fumble around for it at the end, maybe wouldn’t have either one and would miserably fail the question paper or plastic.

The woman half checked out in my line only had a few items, but then, after I’d committed, she hauled out some coupon for double ‘points’. What the hell ‘points’ got her, I sure didn’t know, but by god they wanted them. The cashier shook her head, made a phone call, asked her customer some further questions, made another phone call. “OH!” she said to the unseen supervisor on the phone. “Those are only double on Thursdays, Fridays and the 32nd of June.” Mystery finally solved, we checked her out and moved on to the couple between me and my escape into the sunshine. I knew I was in trouble when the lady kept hitting numbers on the swipe machine. “Hon,” the cashier said finally, about the fifth time she’s goofed the transaction, “what’re you trying to do?” Hon said, “I’m 92 and my husband is 94. This machine is different where we come from.”

She came from, obviously, the 19th Century. When she dropped her credit card, I shot down to pick it up. I’m no spring chicken myself, but hey, she’s 92! I didn’t want to call 9-1-1 and anyway, she and I didn’t carry a cellphone to make that call.

“My dad turned 92 this year,” I told her. “You’re doing way better than him.” Half the time I expect we’ll have the security guard escort us out the way he handles the grocery card then the credit card then gets them mixed up.

It took me an extra day to get out of that store, but all I could think was I hope I’m as spry as these two nonagenarians at their age. Hell, I just hope I REACH their age. Although, when I piled into my truck out in the parking lot, I spent a few extra minutes making sure Ma and Pa had left the area. No point meeting up again fender to fender….

Didn’t I just write about parrots in my produce section? I thought I’d pretty much seen it all. Course, you think that, you’re either in hospice or you haven’t watched reality TV lately. Down here on the South End, if we know one thing, it’s this: something weirder is coming down the blacktop, probably sooner than later.

This weekend I was loitering by the dairy case looking for some growth-hormoned-up milk products when a guy passes by me and on his back, plastered down like a silk-screened tattoo was this scaly lizard , claws hanging on to his t-shirt at the neck. At first I thought it was a rubber toy. You know, give grandma a good laugh when she recovers from her heart attack. But it was real. Some gila monster or maybe a small komodo dragon, hard for me to say not being a herpetologist.

I don’t know — maybe you got a python you like to go to the mall with. Or a crocodile tame enough to bring to the daycare when you pick up your kid. Maybe I’m just an old fogey out of touch with current trends in animal husbandry, a curmudgeon who thinks a vicious pitbull should suffice for those looking for attention-getting pets.

It’s a free country I’m told, especially on the live and let live South End. In fact, Jungle Jim informed me of that when I asked him why he needed a lizard to go shopping with. At the checkout line I paid my bill and said to Jenny as she handed me change, “There’s a guy coming through with a gila monster on his back pretty soon.” She laughed. I said, “No, seriously, he’s got a two foot lizard on his back.” From her reaction, I’d guess they don’t see a whole lot of reptiles in the store. Jenny asked what did I think.

“Tell him you’ve got to weigh it.”

“Weigh it?” Jenny asked.

“Sure, tell him you charge $14.99 a pound for whole lizard. More if he wants it cleaned and deboned.”

Somehow I don’t think Jenny was going to. The customer, I guess, is always right.

You live upriver half your life, you’d feel a little like the world was constantly moving past you, no slowing it down. I think folks who live down further where the river empties into the Sound must watch the tides go out then come back in. Over and over. Do they see the world as a constant ebb and tide? A flowing out, then a return? Is the world to them like breathing, an inhalation and exhalation?

I was up Otter Creek last week checking on Indian Bob. He’s part Stillaguamish, part Norwegian and mostly, just Ornery. Lives alone, he says, because he likes it that way, but I know he couldn’t live two days with someone before it drove him to homicide. He has set routines and he likes to keep em set. He tolerates my visits — interruptions to him — for awhile, but not long. He’ll announce he’s got to get back to his chores even though both of us know he’s going to watch daytime TV with his two dogs. It’s my signal that it’s time to quit our socializing.

Bob has a rundown cabin set beside a backwash that dries up most summers when Otter Creek becomes little more than a trickle. I often think his world is more attuned to seasonal shifts. Time flows, just way slower.

I don’t so much think of Bob as native American as I do Zen Priest. It’s like he’s nearly stopped the River. I would go bat guano crazy with boredom living his life, but like I said, I’m a river person and the universe is in constant motion for me, maybe WHY I live upriver. Or maybe I became this way because I live here. Do you choose your environment or does your environment make you?

Indian Bob told me once his grandmother, a Stillaguamish elder back when Elder meant something, told him that there are no mysteries for those who ask no questions. All I can figure is she must’ve lived on a lake. Me, I got lots of questions, just not enough answers.